Another Power Grab By Our Corporate Overlords

Below are my notes to my representatives regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT IP Act – PIPA… Could there be a more lengthy Orwellian name?). I have emailed my representatives only once or twice before in 20 years of following politics.

Of course I first looked up their positions on these bills before sending an email and was dismayed to find out that my Congressman, Peter King, was co-sponsoring SOPA while my Senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, are co-sponsoring PIPA.

On each of their official .gov websites there is a drop-down menu of issues/topics to choose from as the subject line. Most people writing to Peter King are going to choose Telecommunications, but I think this is a much bigger issue.

Rep. Peter King

Congressman King,

Please withdraw your sponsorship of SOPA. It is an ineffective way to stop internet piracy. And it is ultimately destructive for the growth of the internet and therefore the growth of knowledge of the populace. That’s why I chose Education as the issue instead of Telecommunications.

Thank you for your time.
Matt

Senator Charles Schumer

Senator Schumer,

Please withdraw your sponsorship of the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act. It is an ineffective way to stop internet piracy. And it is ultimately destructive for the growth of the internet and therefore the growth of knowledge of the populace. That’s why I chose Education as the issue.

Thank you for your time.
Matt

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand

Kirsten, you ignorant slut!

Please withdraw your sponsorship of PIPA. I have already contacted Chuck Schumer with a similar request to save you the time you will no doubt use to confer with him before meeting with the corporate lobbyists that have you all bought and paid for.

_______________________________

The letter to Gillibrand was actually the same one sent to Schumer.

Not just because I have a website and spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet, but the more I find out about these bills the more worried I get.

The author of PIPA is Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont – a total party hack who erroneously ties the high unemployment to internet piracy. He’s stated, “Much of what has been claimed about the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act is flatly wrong and seems intended more to stoke fear and concern than to shed light or foster workable solutions…. Protecting foreign criminals from liability rather than protecting American copyright holders and intellectual property developers is irresponsible, will cost American jobs, and is just wrong.”

Vice President Dick Cheney had the best response to Leahy several years ago: “Go f*ck yourself.”

And to add to Cheney’s eloquence, why doesn’t Senator Leahy specify only foreign-owned websites be blocked?

What this is all about is what the initial Tea Party movement and initial Occupy Wall Street movement were about: business executives and politicians ignoring regular people to conspire together to make laws that favor corporations who then give money to candidates to win elections to then write more laws that favor corporations who then give more money to the same candidates. The cycle goes on and on because there aren’t term limits.

Amazingly there are some sites with the History of the Internet that do not include its most important moment. The first email, first website, and first search engine are all important. But the most important moment was when the power of the elites completely shifted to the people forever.

The significance of Matthew Nathan Drudge supplanting the establishment press to scandalize both Newsweek and the President is a moment in world history that cannot be underestimated. One of the turning points in human civilization was the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg which democratized knowledge and created an entirely separate Zeitgeist of new ideas about science and government that the monarchs and Catholic Church would not allow before. The Founding Fathers enshrined freedom of speech and freedom of the press as negative rights that the government could not take away from the people.

Since “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” it’s no surprise that elites and corporations took them over. This allowed them to control the Narrative. But the powerful have a problem now, the largest problem the pezzonovante have ever faced. Gutenberg’s invention received its biggest upgrade in 550 years. The internet gave everyone a printing press.

These moments are all connected. The ability of an individual person to use the internet to communicate to the entire world for little money to promote the best people, places, and things and rail against the worst of them while another individual can support or refute those claims so the population can come close to The Truth is in many ways the fulfillment of a free society. It is nearly everything the champions of liberty from John Locke to Ron Paul could have hoped for.

There is no better illustration of the internet’s promise than the breaking of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It was the forefather to the toppling of Arab governments and hopefully the forefather to the failure of this legislation which would be against the wishes of the most powerful lobbyists like the Chamber of Commerce who have always gotten their way.